Dinosaurs Have Had Their Day

Once upon a time, (not so) long ago in 2004, two young technologies were born from the same open source origins – Hadoop and Pentaho. Both evolved quickly from the market’s demand for better, larger-scale analytics, that could be adopted faster to benefit more players

Most who adopt Hadoop want to be disruptive leaders in their market without breaking the bank. Earlier this month at Hadoop Summit 2014, I talked to many people who told me, “I’d like to get off of <insert old proprietary software here> for my new big data applications and that’s why we’re looking at Pentaho.” It’s simple – no company is going to adopt Hadoop and then turn around and pay the likes of Informatica, Oracle or SAS outrageous amounts for data engineering or analytics.

Big data is the asteroid that has hit the tech market and changed its landscape forever, giving life to new business models and architectures based on open source technologies. First the ancient dinosaurs ignored open source, then they fought it and now they are trying to embrace it. But the mighty force of evolution had other plans. Dinosaurs are giving way to a more nimble generation that doesn’t depend on a mammoth diet of maintenance revenue, exorbitant license fees and long-term deals just to survive.

In this new world companies must continually evolve to survive and dinosaurs have had their day. It’s incredibly rewarding to be part of a new analytics ecosystem that thrives on open standards, high performance and better value for customers. So many positive evolutionary changes have taken place in the last ten years, I can’t wait to see what the next ten will bring.